blue-eyed

• Audio (General Australian):

  (file)

blue-eyed (comparative more blue-eyed or bluer-eyed, superlative most blue-eyed or bluest-eyed)

1. (idiomatic) Someone's favorite.

   blue-eyed boy

   • 1960, P. G. Wodehouse, Jeeves in the Offing, chapter XI:

     “I wouldn't marry anyone else if they came to me bringing apes, ivory and peacocks. Tell me what he was like as a boy.” “Oh, much the same as the rest of us.” “Nonsense!” “Except, of course, for rescuing people from burning buildings and saving blue-eyed children from getting squashed by runaway horses.” “He did that a lot?” “Almost daily.”

2. Naive; innocent; ingenuous. (Can we add an example for this sense?)
3. Characteristic of or pertaining to white people; Caucasian.

   blue-eyed performer

   • 1965, Malcolm X, Alex Haley, “Savior”, in The Autobiography of Malcolm X, page 199:

     Elijah Muhammad spoke of how in this wilderness of North America, for centuries the “blue-eyed devil white man” had brainwashed the “so-called Negro.”

   1. (music) Written or performed by white people.

      blue-eyed soul; blue-eyed jazz

4. Used other than figuratively or idiomatically: see blue,‎ eyed (or eye, -ed).
   • 1820, [Walter Scott], chapter XII, in The Abbot. […], volume I, Edinburgh: […] [James Ballantyne & Co.] for Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown, […]; and for Archibald Constable and Company, and John Ballantyne, […], →OCLC, page 251:

     Well then—if I must neither stir out of the gate nor look out at window, I will at least see what the inside of the house contains that may help to pass away one’s time—peradventure, I may light on that blue-eyed laugher in some corner or other.

   • 1874, Dora Russell, “A New Home”, in The Vicar’s Governess. […], volume I, London: Tinsley Brothers, […], →OCLC, page 19:

     They were all of the same type. Rosy, blooming, fair-haired girls, with small straight features, and the mother’s bright blue eyes, but Bonny was the rosiest and the bluest-eyed of them all.

   • 2007, Melissa Benn, “1939”, in One of Us, London: Chatto & Windus, →ISBN, page 31:

     Then, the voice of the oldest of the Lay brothers, the leader of the pack, the tallest, the blackest-haired, the bluest-eyed.

   • 2016 February 4, Meghan Daum, “Curvy or no, Barbie is still a mean girl”, in Los Angeles Times‎^[1], Los Angeles, Calif.: Los Angeles Times Communications, →ISSN, →OCLC, archived from the original on 4 February 2016:

     Iconic Barbie may be blonder, bluer-eyed, richer, thinner, leggier and bustier than everyone else, but she's also “not special” and “disposable.”

• “blue-eyed”, in Lexico, Dictionary.com; Oxford University Press, 2019–2022.